OB Rag

By Colleen O’Connor

‘Tis the season for cherry blossoms. These photos were taken Monday, March 10. Sun, glorious colors. Hardly any crowds. No rain. Couldn’t have been a more perfect antidote to the glumness infecting the country.

The big Japanese Garden Cherry Blossom festival is this weekend (March 14-16) at Balboa Park. Treat yourself.

By Kate Callen

Todd Gloria wants you to know he spotted defects in the Bonus ADU program and he acted quickly to fix them.

And he insists he was appalled that the City’s Land Development Code had a footnote targeting Southeastern San Diego. He used his executive power to remove it at once.

He also invented Taco Tuesdays. He came up with the idea for Zoom meetings. And he personally recruited Manny Machado to sign with the Padres.

We expect politicians to fabricate. They desperately need public approval. That often means twisting the truth to make a loss look like a win.

But there comes a point where spin curdles into farce. Our mayor appears to have reached it.

Musk Calls Social Security ‘the Greatest Ponzi Scheme’ — Musk’s Call for $700 Billion in Cuts Is a ‘Prelude’ to Social Security Privatization

“Why do you lie so much about Social Security? To get people to lose faith in the system, and then you can give it over to Wall Street,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams / Mar 11, 2025

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders warned late Monday that billionaire Elon Musk’s new call for up to $700 billion in cuts to mandatory federal spending is an alarming step in the direction of Social Security privatization, a longstanding—and deeply unpopular—goal of right-wing politicians and corporate-funded think tanks.

Musk, who is spearheading a large-scale assault on federal agencies and workers, told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Monday that “waste and fraud” in “entitlement spending”—a category that includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—is “the big one to eliminate,” estimating that up to $700 billion could be cut from such programs.

By JW August

A recent suggestion by a San Diego City Council Committee to rework the city’s Commission on Police Practices met with sharp resistance last week from the citizens panel.

Instead, the commission  created to oversee the San Diego Police Department rejected the recommendations of the council’s Public Safety Committee to, among other things, change the role of the executive director whose allegiance would no longer be to the commission but rather to the City Council. The result would be to give the council authority over the removal of the director.

The council does have the power to pick the director, but now it was being suggested it would also have the power to fire the director. These “suggestions” came four years into the effort to create an effective commission after a great deal of policy discussions and community feedback.

Public comment at the commission’s meeting last Wednesday evening set the tone.  Longtime civic activist and attorney Kate Yavenditti warned the commission, “Don’t let the City Council take your independence away. That’s exactly what this is all about.”

By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / March 10, 2025

San Diego is raising its city cannabis tax from 8% to 10% — a figure equal to the highest rate in California and significantly higher than the rates of all other local cities.

Critics said the increase, which the City Council approved Monday, will have the effect of boosting the illegal cannabis delivery market by pushing the total tax paid by legal dispensaries on each sale to more than 35% on July 1.

Council members said the tax hike makes them more willing to consider longtime requests from the local cannabis industry for longer hours, on-site consumption lounges and a crackdown on illegal delivery-based operations.

By Steven Greenhut / San Diego U-T / March 9, 2025

Back when conservatives championed ideas rather than outsourced their thinking to their leader, they touted a simple saying: “Ideas have consequences.” Conservatives also understood that while people should always be free to make their own choices based on those ideas, they should be responsible for the consequences of their decisions.

By all means, follow the advice of that YouTube quack who argues that vaccines include microchips that control the population. But when your kid is hospitalized with measles, that’s on you. Unfortunately in a democratic society, the population must endure the brunt of ludicrous ideas imposed by elected officials. (Check out my columns about the awful ones in California.)

We’re now at the “good and hard” part of H.L. Mencken’s definition about democracy being “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it.” That’s certainly the case with economic policy. If you occasionally check your retirement accounts and did so after the last two times President Donald Trump imposed 25-percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, you will have noticed that they dropped precipitously.

by Tessa Balc / Times of San Diego / March 10, 2025

Students across the Grossmont Union High School District are organizing a district-wide walkout in the wake of the school board’s decision to cut teacher-librarians and other staffing positions, such as school counselors.

Immediately following the 4-1 decision to cut staff at the Feb. 27 special meeting, the Instagram account @studentsforstaff.guhsd, which has now amassed just under 1,000 followers, made its first post calling for a peaceful protest on March 11.

Maggie Kelly, a senior at Grossmont High School, is behind the account. Kelly is also one of two seniors elected to sit in on board meetings and provide reports this year.

She said the initial idea was to hold a walk-out at Grossmont High School, but she decided to make it district-wide. On the account, she said, she put out a call for student leaders at each high school to help organize the event on their campuses.

By Lisa Mortensen

Well, our juvenile city hall who is beholden to the developers has given us another issue that we must speak out against.  This time our city council is looking into taking away historical designations.  The city talks a good game that they are concerned about equity and the communities south of highway 8 but this aggressive change to historical designation will do the complete opposite in an area where we have predominately older neighborhoods.

Buyers who purchase a Mills Act designed or potentially eligible home can save thousands on their taxes in return for being stewards to maintain the history and fabric of our communities.  But most importantly, with affordability at historic lows in San Diego county (12% of SD County households can afford to buy a home today), why does the city of San Diego want to remove a major opportunity for buyers to have an affordable option to move into a community.

Please be aware, that there is a two-way agreement with those that receive Mills Act accreditation. Once awarded Mills Act, homeowners must maintain their properties or they will be penalized by the city and may lose their designation.  So those that think this is simply a tax reduction scheme are listening to the shallow talking points from those who do not own property and do not understand that with the responsibility of homeownership is basically the responsibility of maintenance. With Mills Act this is a primary requirement.

By Scott Dance and Joshua Partlow / Washington Post / March 7, 2025

The Army Corps of Engineers colonel responsible for releasing water from two California reservoirs at President Donald Trump’s direction in January knew that it was unlikely to reach the southern part of the state as Trump had promised, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The agency carried out Trump’s directive, which came in the wake of catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles County, on short notice on Jan. 30, though it would normally require days to coordinate. A memo written four days after the release, obtained by The Post through a public records request, shows how federal officials rushed ahead with the plan to release irrigation water despite objections from the state’s elected officials and some local farmers.

Col. Chad W. Caldwell, commander of the Army Corps’ Sacramento district, wrote that the water that poured out of Lake Kaweah and Success Lake “could not be delivered to Southern California directly.”

By Steven Mihailovich / Point Loma – OB Monthly SDU-T / March 6, 2025

A growing preponderance of recreational vehicles being parked at Robb Field, leading to a scarcity of parking spaces for the increasing number of visitors as the weather begins to warm and softball season gets underway, was a subject of discontent at the Ocean Beach Community Foundation’s February meeting.

San Diego Police Department Community Relations Officer James Harris said he had received dozens of emails about the situation and said he visited the parking lot three weeks before the Feb. 26 meeting. He counted 105 RVs, he said, most of which he suspected were being used as housing for their occupants.

“But they’re taking up two spots and now we’ve got 210 spots gone and that’s a real problem,” Harris said. “Plus, you don’t feel safe potentially parking next to that. I get all these complaints and I feel those complaints.”

By Lori Weisberg / The San Diego Union-Tribune / March 7, 2025

Two environmental groups sued SeaWorld last week accusing the San Diego marine park of illegally discharging pollutants into Mission Bay during the dozens of fireworks shows it puts on each year.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court by San Diego Coastkeeper and the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation (CERF), cites multiple violations of the federal Clean Water Act and the parks’ own permit that allows it to conduct up to 150 fireworks shows a year.

The 39-page complaint documents not only instances of paper, plastic and metal fireworks debris in the bay following SeaWorld shows, but it also claims to have found concentrations of metal pollutants such as aluminum, antimony and copper that far exceeded normal levels elsewhere in the bay.

By Mat Wahlstrom / Special to the OB Rag

Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 11, the Uptown Community Planning Group (UpCPG) that was chosen to replace Uptown Planners, will hold the final in-person voting for its first regular election.

Readers of the OB Rag may recall that the last time we visited the city’s shenanigans in Uptown was September 2024. Back then, the City Council had to take time out to retroactively bless the malfeasance and fraud committed by Vibrant Uptown, their handpicked YIMBY usurpers.

Despite Vibrant Uptown’s efforts , the composition of the final board was roughly split between their endorsed candidates and those not beholden to their pro-developer agenda. Understandably, this led to conflicts that should be understood as natural and part of learning to operate under new rules.